influence of pop culture
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Week2discussiontheoriespopculture.docxUnit 2
Theories of Pop Culture
Initially, producing culture for the masses was controlled by a few institutions that could afford the latest technology and could utilize a sophisticated division of labor. This gave them tremendous influence over the kinds of entertainment that was offered and, perhaps, allowed them to manipulate their audiences. This concentration of power in the culture industries has been an ongoing concern. Political theorists like Antonio Gramsci argue that dominant groups in society maintain control over society by securing the consent of subordinate groups through some form of persuasion. His theory suggests that producers and distributers of popular culture will use its influence to shape and mold public opinion to support their interests. Many theories have been advanced to explain the relationship of the producers of mass culture their audience and the possible harm that results from this relationship. In Unit II, we examine theories that consider the relationship between the producers of popular culture and their audience and the consequences this relationship has for society. These theories will shed light on how popular culture should be interpreted and evaluated.
Topic 1: Theories of Pop Culture
This topic addresses the following objectives: Analyze an artifact of popular culture from multiple perspectives.
Estimated time to complete topic: 1 hour
Evaluate: The theories of popular culture.
This topic will explore the theories of popular culture, from the Frankfurt School to postmodernism.
Click on the tabs below to learn more about critical theory and mass culture theory.
Analyze: Critical Theory
Watch: The Frankfurt School and Popular Culture
No transcript is currently available
Estimated time to complete: 13 minutes
Critical Theory was developed by the Frankfurt School for Social Research. Its founders were mostly German Jewish intellectuals who immigrated to America during World War II. The Frankfurt School was a social and political movement. Many of their ideas are influenced Marxism, and many of their writing expand on Marx’s criticisms of capitalism. The Frankfurt School saw modern capitalism as carrying on the ideals of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was characterized by revolutions in science, philosophy, society and politics; these revolutions swept away the medieval worldview and ushered in our modern Western world. Major thinkers in the Enlightenment (like Descartes and Spinoza) thought that human affairs should be guided by reason instead of superstition, faith, and revelation. The Enlightenment sought to empower people to think for themselves and rely on their own intellectual capacities to determine what they should believe.
While the Enlightenment did a great deal of good in terms of turning toward reason and away from superstition, the Frankfurt School claimed that the project of the Enlightenment has been totalizing. The Enlightenment idea of reason had come to dominate society in the form technological rationality or instrumental reason. Instead of using reason to generate ideals that would enhance the human condition, reason is used to select the best possible means for achieving a particular end. Instrumental rationality values efficiency and standardization, and these values have come to dominant our attitude toward the natural world and human relationships. These values have been extended to every aspect of society including culture.
Critical Theory uses the term “culture industry” to refer to the “commodification of cultural products by monopoly capitalism.” Cultural products are valued primarily for their ability to generate profits. Mass media produces cultural product using instrumental reason. This has resulted in the standardization of all forms of creativity. The culture industry produces cultural goods e.g., books, movies, music in the most scientific way, and this enables them to discover the effectively products for satisfying the desires of the masses. This results in increased profits. Once the culture industry discovers the best formula for making society happy, then all cultural products are standardized to reflect this formula. The results in a decline in authentic creative expression.
Culture is thus imposed upon the masses for the sole purpose of extracting profit. The products of the culture industry encourage conformity and consensus. Consumers are provided with a limited number of choices with little variation. The culture industry relies on tested formulas that sell, so songs, movies books etc only appear different because of slight variations, but, in reality, they share the same identical structure. This furthers the power of the culture industry to control what the masses desire. The masses unwittingly participate in their own subjugation by coming to believe that their happiness depends own acquiring the products of the culture industry. This ensures the authority of the culture industry to determine what is valuable and maintains the stability of the capitalist system since there is a steady source of consumers who line up to buy their products. In conclusion, Critical Theory believes that the productions of the culture industry are devoid of creativity, and its beliefs that the values associated with popular culture do not arises spontaneously from the masses but are imposed on them by the culture industry.
Watch: Criticism of Critical Theory and The Frankfort School.
No transcript is currently available
Estimated time to complete: 7 minutes
Watch: Netflix’s War on Mass Culture
Estimated time to complete: 14 minutes
No transcript is currently available
Topic 2: Postmodernism
This topic addresses the following objectives: Analyze an artifact of popular culture from multiple perspectives.
Estimated time to complete topic: 2 hours
Evaluate: Postmodernism.
Watch: Is Community a Postmodern Masterpiece?
No transcript is currently available
Estimated time to complete: 9 minutes
As you watch the video, think about the following:
What is postmodernism?
Is community an example of postmodernism?
Watch: Postmodernism and Popular Culture
No transcript is currently available
Estimated time to complete: 16 minutes
“…mass media and popular culture are the most important and powerful insitutions, and control and shape all other types of social relationships”
The proponents of Mass Culture Theory worried that the distinction between high art and popular culture would be blurred and high art would no longer be differentiated from popular culture. Postmodernism embraces this view. Postmodernism rejects cultural elitism. Mass produced urban culture - movies, advertising, science fiction, pop music is embraced. Postmodernism treats pop culture with the seriousness usually reserved for art, and in this sense, it stands in direct opposition to the cultural elitism of mass cultural theory and critical theory. Postmodernism also embraces the commodification an endless variety of objects for any virtually any purpose as occurred when Andy Warhol’s pop art appropriated Marilyn Monroe, Coca Cola, and the Campbell’s Soup can. We see this same phenomenon when advertising unashamedly uses songs and images of the past to sell its products.
Although it is difficult to define Postmodernism, it is associated with a number of features such as superficiality, pastiche, the confusion of time and space, and the rejection of grand narratives. Superficiality stresses style over substance or content. We see this in art and fashion with unnecessary, over-the-top ornamentation. This is also seen in the emphasis on cultivating an image or look. People buy SUVs even though they do not need them, and people wear baggy paints even though they are not practical. Meaning and purpose are less important than appearances. Pastiche refers to art that freely appropriates, recycles, and combines disparate styles and periods. Pastiche is sometimes referred to “blank parody’ because integrates cultural references without making an explicit social or political statement. Examples of pastiche can be found in postmodern architecture, nostalgia film, and postmodern historic novels. Another feature associated with postmodernism is the confusion over time and space. The world is much smaller. We can skype with people in China, and commercial interactions can take place in a split section. Our conceptions of time and space are less stable and constantly changing. This confusion of space and time is illustrated in the movie Back to the Future where time can be easily be traversed, and the movie Bladerunner was made in the style of a 1950s film-noir that occurs in a future Los Angeles. Finally, postmodernism is associated with the rejection of metanarratives. Modernism clings to the notion of a single narrative to explain the causes and effects of historical events. These narratives are provided by science, religion, and political theory to explain the purpose and meaning of historical events. Postmodernism rejects this idea. History cannot be explained by single perspective or God’s eye view, and society should not be seen as progressing or evolving toward some pre-determined end or ethical ideal. Since there is no dominant perspective – there are no enduring standards by which to judge events, and this also applies to art and genus. This has opened up multiple narratives for what counts for art, and it has created a more inclusive space for feminist and minority art.
The rise of mass media really spurred the popularity of postmodernism. In the last 50 years, the world has become interconnected in completely new ways. This has allowed mass media to juxtapose images and ideas in completely novel ways. As a consequence, postmodernism has produced forms of creative expression that were sometimes unsettling, confusing, and even quirky. Postmodernism reflects the way many people experience the world today, and this helps explain its strong appeal to young people who find themselves living in a fragmented, rapidly changing world where they have shifting identities and find themselves interacting with others on multiple levels.
Review: Debate of Postmodernism
This section reviews the development of postmodern theory from its beginnings in the United States and Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s, through its theorization in the work of Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson.
Click on the tabs below to learn more about each of the postmodernism views.
Evaluate: Francois Lyotard and Postmodernism View
Watch: Francois Lyotard and Postmodernism
No transcript is currently available
Estimated time to complete: 8 minutes
Jean-François Lyotard’s principal contribution to the debate on postmodernism is The Postmodern Condition, published in France in 1979, and translated into English in 1984. The influence of this book on the debate has been enormous. In many respects it was this book that introduced the term ‘postmodernism’ into academic circulation. For Lyotard the postmodern condition is marked by a crisis in the status of knowledge in Western societies. This is expressed as an ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ and what he calls ‘the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation’ (xxiv). What Lyotard is referring to is the supposed contemporary collapse or widespread rejection of all overarching and totalizing frameworks that seek to tell universal stories (‘metanarratives’): Marxism, liberalism, Christianity, for example. According to Lyotard, metanarratives operate through inclusion and exclusion, as homogenizing forces, marshalling heterogeneity into ordered realms, silencing and excluding other discourses, other voices in the name of universal principles and general goals. Postmodernism is said to signal the collapse of all metanarratives with their privileged truth to tell, and to witness instead the increasing sound of a plurality of voices from the margins, with their insistence on difference, on cultural diversity, and the claims of heterogeneity over homogeneity. Lyotard’s particular focus is on the status and function of scientific discourse and knowledge. Science is important for Lyotard because of the role assigned to it by the Enlightenment. Its task, through the accumulation of scientific knowledge, is to play a central role in the gradual emancipation of humankind. In this way, science assumes the status of a metanarrative, organizing and validating other narratives on the royal road to human liberation.
However, Lyotard claims that since the Second World War, the legitimating force of science’s status as a metanarrative has waned considerably. It is no longer seen to be slowly making progress on behalf of humankind towards absolute knowledge and absolute freedom. It has lost its way – its ‘goal is no longer truth, but performativity’. Similarly, higher education is ‘called upon to create skills, and no longer ideals’. Knowledge is no longer seen as an end in itself, but as a means to an end. Like science, education will be judged by its performativity; and as such it will be increasingly shaped by the demands of power. No longer will it respond to the question, ‘Is it true?’ It will hear only, ‘What use is it?’ ‘How much is it worth?’ and ‘Is it saleable?’ Postmodern pedagogy would teach how to use knowledge as a form of cultural and economic capital without recourse to concern or anxiety about whether what is taught is true or false. Before leaving Lyotard, it is worth noting his own less than favourable response to the changed status of culture. The popular culture (‘contemporary general culture’) of the postmodern condition is for Lyotard an ‘anything goes’ culture, a culture of ‘slackening’, where taste is irrelevant, and money the only sign of value. The only relief is Lyotard’s view that postmodernist culture is not the end of the much superior culture of modernism, but the sign of the advent of a new modernism. Postmodernism is that which breaks with one modernism to form a new modernism: ‘A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant’.
Postmodernism has enfranchised a new body of intellectuals: ‘the coming into being of those whose voices were historically drowned out by the (modernist) metanarratives of mastery, which were in turn both patriarchal and imperialist’.
While the loudest voices in the culture announced nothing less than the end of everything of any value, the emerging voices, practices and identities of dispersed African, Caribbean and Asian peoples crept in from the margins of postimperial Britain to dislocate commonplace certainties and consensual ‘truths’ and thus open up new ways of seeing, and understanding, the peculiarities of living in the twilight of an historic interregnum in which ‘the old is dying and the new cannot be born’.
Watch: Postmodernism – Six Minute Theory
Estimated time to complete: 6 minutes
No transcript is currently available
Analyze: Postmodern Pop Music and Television
A discussion of postmodernism and popular culture might highlight any number of different cultural texts and practices: for example, television, music video, advertising, film, pop music, fashion. There can be little doubt that similar things are happening in, for example, music, cinema, advertising, fashion, and in the different lived cultures of everyday life. It is not a sign that there has been a general collapse of the distinctions people make between, say, high culture / low culture, past/present, history/nostalgia, fiction/reality; but it is a sign that such distinctions (first noticed in the 1960s, and gradually more so ever since) are becoming increasingly less important, less obvious, less taken for granted.
But this does not of course mean that such distinctions cannot be, and are not being, articulated and mobilized for particular strategies of social distinction. But above all, we should not take any of these changes at face value; we must always be alert to the what, why and for whom something is being articulated, and how it can always be articulated differently, in other contexts.
Click on the tabs below to learn more about postmodern in pop music, television, and film.
· Cinema
Evaluate: Postmodern Pop Music
Watch: Modernism in Music
No transcript is currently available
Estimated time to complete: 15 minutes
For Jameson the difference between modernist and postmodernist pop music is quite clear: The Beatles and The Rolling Stones represent a modernist moment against which punk rock (The Clash, for example) and new wave (Talking Heads, for example) can be seen as postmodernist. It has quite correctly pointed out that Jameson’s compressed time-span solution – pop music culture’s rapid progression through ‘realism’ (rock’n’roll), ‘modernism’, ‘postmodernism’ – enabling Jameson to establish a modernist moment against which to mark out a postmodernist response, is a very difficult argument to sustain. As Goodwin convincingly argues, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones are as different from each other as together they are different from The Clash and Talking Heads. In fact, it would be much easier to make an argument in which the distinction is made between the ‘artifice’ of The Beatles and Talking Heads and the ‘authenticity’ of The Rolling Stones and The Clash.
Goodwin himself considers a number of ways of seeing pop music and pop music culture as postmodernist. Perhaps its most cited aspect is the technological developments that have facilitated the emergence of ‘sampling’. He acknowledges that the parallel with some postmodern theorizing is interesting and suggestive, but that is all it is – interesting and suggestive. What is often missed in such claims is the way in which sampling is used. As he explains, ‘textual incorporation cannot be adequately understood as “blank parody”. We need categories to add to pastiche, which demonstrate how contemporary pop opposes, celebrates and promotes the texts it steals from’. We also need to be aware of ‘the historicizing function of sampling technologies in contemporary pop’, the many ways in which sampling is ‘used to invoke history and authenticity’. Moreover, in regard to Jameson’s argument about nostalgia replacing history, ‘it has often been overlooked that the “quoting” of sounds and styles acts to historicize contemporary culture’. Rap is perhaps the best example of sampling being used in this way. When asked to name the black means of cultural expression, the African American cultural theorist Cornel West, answered, ‘music and preaching’. He went on to say,
rap is unique because it combines the black preacher and the black music tradition, replacing the liturgical ecclesiastical setting with the African polyrhythms of the street. A tremendous articulateness is syncopated with the African drumbeat, the African funk, into an American postmodernist product: there is no subject expressing originary anguish here but a fragmented subject, pulling from past and present, innovatively producing a heterogeneous product. The stylistic combination of the oral, the literate, and the musical is exemplary . . . it is part and parcel of the subversive energies of black underclass youth, energies that are forced to take a cultural mode of articulation because of the political lethargy of American society.
This is a rejection of Jameson’s claim that such work can be dismissed as an example of postmodern pastiche. The intertextual play of quotations in rap is not the result of aesthetic exhaustion; these are not the fragments of modernism shored against aesthetic ruin and cultural decline, but fragments combined to make a voice to be heard loudly within a hostile culture: the twisting of dismissal and denial into defiance.
Watch: Modernism and Postmodernism – An Analysis of Blow-Up
Estimated time to complete: 10 minutes
No transcript is currently available
Watch: OK Soda - Advertising and Postmodernism
Estimated time to complete: 9 minutes
No transcript is currently available
Topic 4: Metanarratives
This topic addresses the following objectives: Analyze an artifact of popular culture from multiple perspectives.
Estimated time to complete topic: 30 minutes Evaluate: Metanarratives
Watch: Postmodernism & the Metanarrative
No transcript is currently available
Estimated time to complete: 4 minutes
Evaluate: Metanarratives – Social Justice Art Education
While art tends to be thought of as something that belongs in a museum or hanging on a wall in a house, there are actually many different kinds of artistic expression. This unit looks at a specific kind of art that takes place in public spaces, specifically social justice art. Social justice art fits into a family of like-minded artistic expressions, like community-based art, public art, and art for social change. These community-based and collaborative forms of art aim at challenging the status quo in society and working toward justice for all.
As you read the resource for this unit, consider how art reflects individuals’ own identities, experiences, and interests, especially when working in a collaborative setting. You might want to reflect on where you’ve seen community-based art projects, especially since they’ve grown in popularity recently: Are there murals, community gardens, or even graffiti projects that you’ve seen firsthand that would fall under the heading of social justice art? What do you make of these projects?
Watch: Art as Activism
No transcript is currently available
Estimated time to complete: 14 minutes
Evaluate: Metanarratives – TED Talks and Traditional Popular Culture
You have probably watched at least one TED Talk in your life, and you have likely watched at least one in your education at Herzing, either in required or supplemental materials for your courses. TED stands for technology, entertainment, and design, and the initial idea was to have original thinkers and industry leaders give speeches that “pack a punch” in 18 minutes or less. TED Talks have grown enormously in popularity.
Watch: Pop culture is dead! – TEDx Working
Estimated time to complete: 13 minutes
Topic 6: Social Injustice and Pop Culture Movements
This topic addresses the following objectives: Analyze an artifact of popular culture from multiple perspectives.
Estimated time to complete topic: 2 hours Evaluate: Social Justice and Pop Culture Movements
Watch: Pop Culture: What's Wrong with the Media
No transcript is currently available
Estimated time to complete: 5 minutes
Topic 7: Blending Pop Culture
This topic addresses the following objectives: Analyze an artifact of popular culture from multiple perspectives.
Estimated time to complete topic: 2 hours
Review: Blending Pop Culture.
Many voices can work toward forming one narrative, be it in terms of the relationship between spiritual and sacred music, or toward exposing social injustices and ills. Pop culture can help blend in cultures from every where.
Watch: Pop Culture in the Arab World
No transcript is currently available
Estimated time to complete: 8 minutes
Unit Knowledge Check
Estimated time to complete: 15 minutes
This 10 point activity is designed to assist you in determining your understanding of the unit’s content.
· Return to Canvas and complete the unit knowledge check to assess personal knowledge on topics covered in this unit.
· Take note of questions that are difficult.
· Review difficult topics prior to repeating the knowledge check or moving on to the next unit.
· You have two attempts available, the highest score will be used.
References
· Books
· Videos
Storey, John (ed.), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, 4th edition, Harlow: Pearson Education, 2009.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KfjrljuHZw&t=2s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEB1-_HGRJo&t=1s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4amxd3gelIo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YanhEVEgkYI&t=1s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZIDgp6Kzlo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZpF-IF9NzE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4Njc_V7nU8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfmbA7fPRsw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlzzfR23s4I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9R0RkANsy4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEpZJ0NpxH8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLg8LMK_Ct4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkDYlQhx0wY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwPdAZPnk7k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROgFmb3oTLo
The social significance of popular culture in the modern era can be charted by the way it has been identified with mass culture. The coming of the mass media and the increasing commercialisation of culture and leisure gave rise to issues, interests and debates which are still with us today. The growth of the idea of mass culture, very evident from the 1920s and 1930s onwards, is one of the historical sources of the themes and perspectives on popular culture.
The development of the idea of popular culture is linked to arguments about meaning and interpretation which predate but become strikingly evident in the debates over mass culture. In particular, three related themes can be found in the work referred to above which, while not being exhaustive, have been central to theories of popular culture ever since. The first concerns what or who determines popular culture. Where does popular culture come from? Does it emerge from the people themselves as an autonomous expression of their interests and modes of experience, or is it imposed from above by those in positions of power as a type of social control? Does popular culture rise up from the people ‘below’, or does it sink down from elites ‘on high’, or is it rather a question of an interaction between the two? The second theme concerns the influence of commercialisation and industrialisation upon popular culture. Does the emergence of culture in commodity forms mean that criteria of profitability and marketability take precedence over quality, artistry, integrity and intellectual challenge? Or does the increasingly universal market for popular culture ensure that it is truly popular because it makes available commodities people actually want? What wins out when popular culture is manufactured industrially and sold according to the criteria of marketability and profitability— commerce or quality? The third theme concerns the ideological role of popular culture. Is popular culture there to indoctrinate the people, to get them to accept and adhere to ideas and values which ensure the continued dominance of those in more privileged positions who thus exercise power over them? Or is it about rebellion and opposition to the prevailing social order? Does it express, in however an imperceptible, subtle and rudimentary manner, resistance to those in power, and the subversion of dominant ways of thinking and acting?
These are issues which are still very much alive in the study of popular culture today, but they (as well as others) received systematic and substantial attention in the debates about mass culture which started to gather pace from the 1920s onwards. The 1920s and 1930s are significant turning points in the study and evaluation of popular culture. The coming of cinema and radio, the mass production and consumption of culture, the rise of fascism and the maturing of liberal democracies in certain western societies, all played their part in setting the agendas of these debates.
The very fact that culture came to be almost infinitely reproducible due to the development of techniques of industrial production posed considerable problems for traditional ideas about the role of culture and art in society. Cultural products such as films were not, of course, mass produced in the same way as motor cars. However, the introduction of mass production techniques into MASS CULTURE the making of films, and the mass consumption afforded by cinemas, meant they could be regarded as commercial products. For a number of the writers we shall look at in this chapter, this meant that cultural products, such as cinema, could not be authentic and genuine works of art. Equally, they could not be ‘folk’ culture because they no longer came from the ‘people’, and therefore could not reflect or satisfy their experiences and interests.
Watch: Netflix’s War on Mass Culture
Estimated time to complete: 14 minutes
No transcript is currently available
Topic 2: Postmodernism
This topic addresses the following objectives: Analyze an artifact of popular culture from multiple perspectives.
Estimated time to complete topic: 2 hours
Evaluate: Postmodernism.
Watch: Is Community a Postmodern Masterpiece?
No transcript is currently available
Estimated time to complete: 9 minutes
As you watch the video, think about the following:
What is postmodernism?
Is community an example of postmodernism?
Watch: Postmodernism and Popular Culture
No transcript is currently available
Estimated time to complete: 16 minutes
“…mass media and popular culture are the most important and powerful insitutions, and control and shape all other types of social relationships”
The proponents of Mass Culture Theory worried that the distinction between high art and popular culture would be blurred and high art would no longer be differentiated from popular culture. Postmodernism embraces this view. Postmodernism rejects cultural elitism. Mass produced urban culture - movies, advertising, science fiction, pop music is embraced. Postmodernism treats pop culture with the seriousness usually reserved for art, and in this sense, it stands in direct opposition to the cultural elitism of mass cultural theory and critical theory. Postmodernism also embraces the commodification an endless variety of objects for any virtually any purpose as occurred when Andy Warhol’s pop art appropriated Marilyn Monroe, Coca Cola, and the Campbell’s Soup can. We see this same phenomenon when advertising unashamedly uses songs and images of the past to sell its products.
Although it is difficult to define Postmodernism, it is associated with a number of features such as superficiality, pastiche, the confusion of time and space, and the rejection of grand narratives. Superficiality stresses style over substance or content. We see this in art and fashion with unnecessary, over-the-top ornamentation. This is also seen in the emphasis on cultivating an image or look. People buy SUVs even though they do not need them, and people wear baggy paints even though they are not practical. Meaning and purpose are less important than appearances. Pastiche refers to art that freely appropriates, recycles, and combines disparate styles and periods. Pastiche is sometimes referred to “blank parody’ because integrates cultural references without making an explicit social or political statement. Examples of pastiche can be found in postmodern architecture, nostalgia film, and postmodern historic novels. Another feature associated with postmodernism is the confusion over time and space. The world is much smaller. We can skype with people in China, and commercial interactions can take place in a split section. Our conceptions of time and space are less stable and constantly changing. This confusion of space and time is illustrated in the movie Back to the Future where time can be easily be traversed, and the movie Bladerunner was made in the style of a 1950s film-noir that occurs in a future Los Angeles. Finally, postmodernism is associated with the rejection of metanarratives. Modernism clings to the notion of a single narrative to explain the causes and effects of historical events. These narratives are provided by science, religion, and political theory to explain the purpose and meaning of historical events. Postmodernism rejects this idea. History cannot be explained by single perspective or God’s eye view, and society should not be seen as progressing or evolving toward some pre-determined end or ethical ideal. Since there is no dominant perspective – there are no enduring standards by which to judge events, and this also applies to art and genus. This has opened up multiple narratives for what counts for art, and it has created a more inclusive space for feminist and minority art.
The rise of mass media really spurred the popularity of postmodernism. In the last 50 years, the world has become interconnected in completely new ways. This has allowed mass media to juxtapose images and ideas in completely novel ways. As a consequence, postmodernism has produced forms of creative expression that were sometimes unsettling, confusing, and even quirky. Postmodernism reflects the way many people experience the world today, and this helps explain its strong appeal to young people who find themselves living in a fragmented, rapidly changing world where they have shifting identities and find themselves interacting with others on multiple levels.
Review: Debate of Postmodernism
This section reviews the development of postmodern theory from its beginnings in the United States and Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s, through its theorization in the work of Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson.
Click on the tabs below to learn more about each of the postmodernism views.
Evaluate: Francois Lyotard and Postmodernism View
Watch: Francois Lyotard and Postmodernism
No transcript is currently available
Estimated time to complete: 8 minutes
Jean-François Lyotard’s principal contribution to the debate on postmodernism is The Postmodern Condition, published in France in 1979, and translated into English in 1984. The influence of this book on the debate has been enormous. In many respects it was this book that introduced the term ‘postmodernism’ into academic circulation. For Lyotard the postmodern condition is marked by a crisis in the status of knowledge in Western societies. This is expressed as an ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ and what he calls ‘the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation’ (xxiv). What Lyotard is referring to is the supposed contemporary collapse or widespread rejection of all overarching and totalizing frameworks that seek to tell universal stories (‘metanarratives’): Marxism, liberalism, Christianity, for example. According to Lyotard, metanarratives operate through inclusion and exclusion, as homogenizing forces, marshalling heterogeneity into ordered realms, silencing and excluding other discourses, other voices in the name of universal principles and general goals. Postmodernism is said to signal the collapse of all metanarratives with their privileged truth to tell, and to witness instead the increasing sound of a plurality of voices from the margins, with their insistence on difference, on cultural diversity, and the claims of heterogeneity over homogeneity. Lyotard’s particular focus is on the status and function of scientific discourse and knowledge. Science is important for Lyotard because of the role assigned to it by the Enlightenment. Its task, through the accumulation of scientific knowledge, is to play a central role in the gradual emancipation of humankind. In this way, science assumes the status of a metanarrative, organizing and validating other narratives on the royal road to human liberation.
However, Lyotard claims that since the Second World War, the legitimating force of science’s status as a metanarrative has waned considerably. It is no longer seen to be slowly making progress on behalf of humankind towards absolute knowledge and absolute freedom. It has lost its way – its ‘goal is no longer truth, but performativity’. Similarly, higher education is ‘called upon to create skills, and no longer ideals’. Knowledge is no longer seen as an end in itself, but as a means to an end. Like science, education will be judged by its performativity; and as such it will be increasingly shaped by the demands of power. No longer will it respond to the question, ‘Is it true?’ It will hear only, ‘What use is it?’ ‘How much is it worth?’ and ‘Is it saleable?’ Postmodern pedagogy would teach how to use knowledge as a form of cultural and economic capital without recourse to concern or anxiety about whether what is taught is true or false. Before leaving Lyotard, it is worth noting his own less than favourable response to the changed status of culture. The popular culture (‘contemporary general culture’) of the postmodern condition is for Lyotard an ‘anything goes’ culture, a culture of ‘slackening’, where taste is irrelevant, and money the only sign of value. The only relief is Lyotard’s view that postmodernist culture is not the end of the much superior culture of modernism, but the sign of the advent of a new modernism. Postmodernism is that which breaks with one modernism to form a new modernism: ‘A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant’.
Postmodernism has enfranchised a new body of intellectuals: ‘the coming into being of those whose voices were historically drowned out by the (modernist) metanarratives of mastery, which were in turn both patriarchal and imperialist’.
While the loudest voices in the culture announced nothing less than the end of everything of any value, the emerging voices, practices and identities of dispersed African, Caribbean and Asian peoples crept in from the margins of postimperial Britain to dislocate commonplace certainties and consensual ‘truths’ and thus open up new ways of seeing, and understanding, the peculiarities of living in the twilight of an historic interregnum in which ‘the old is dying and the new cannot be born’.
Watch: Postmodernism – Six Minute Theory
Estimated time to complete: 6 minutes
No transcript is currently available
Analyze: Postmodern Pop Music and Television
A discussion of postmodernism and popular culture might highlight any number of different cultural texts and practices: for example, television, music video, advertising, film, pop music, fashion. There can be little doubt that similar things are happening in, for example, music, cinema, advertising, fashion, and in the different lived cultures of everyday life. It is not a sign that there has been a general collapse of the distinctions people make between, say, high culture / low culture, past/present, history/nostalgia, fiction/reality; but it is a sign that such distinctions (first noticed in the 1960s, and gradually more so ever since) are becoming increasingly less important, less obvious, less taken for granted.
But this does not of course mean that such distinctions cannot be, and are not being, articulated and mobilized for particular strategies of social distinction. But above all, we should not take any of these changes at face value; we must always be alert to the what, why and for whom something is being articulated, and how it can always be articulated differently, in other contexts.
Click on the tabs below to learn more about postmodern in pop music, television, and film.
· Cinema
Evaluate: Postmodern Pop Music
Watch: Modernism in Music
No transcript is currently available
Estimated time to complete: 15 minutes
For Jameson the difference between modernist and postmodernist pop music is quite clear: The Beatles and The Rolling Stones represent a modernist moment against which punk rock (The Clash, for example) and new wave (Talking Heads, for example) can be seen as postmodernist. It has quite correctly pointed out that Jameson’s compressed time-span solution – pop music culture’s rapid progression through ‘realism’ (rock’n’roll), ‘modernism’, ‘postmodernism’ – enabling Jameson to establish a modernist moment against which to mark out a postmodernist response, is a very difficult argument to sustain. As Goodwin convincingly argues, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones are as different from each other as together they are different from The Clash and Talking Heads. In fact, it would be much easier to make an argument in which the distinction is made between the ‘artifice’ of The Beatles and Talking Heads and the ‘authenticity’ of The Rolling Stones and The Clash.
Goodwin himself considers a number of ways of seeing pop music and pop music culture as postmodernist. Perhaps its most cited aspect is the technological developments that have facilitated the emergence of ‘sampling’. He acknowledges that the parallel with some postmodern theorizing is interesting and suggestive, but that is all it is – interesting and suggestive. What is often missed in such claims is the way in which sampling is used. As he explains, ‘textual incorporation cannot be adequately understood as “blank parody”. We need categories to add to pastiche, which demonstrate how contemporary pop opposes, celebrates and promotes the texts it steals from’. We also need to be aware of ‘the historicizing function of sampling technologies in contemporary pop’, the many ways in which sampling is ‘used to invoke history and authenticity’. Moreover, in regard to Jameson’s argument about nostalgia replacing history, ‘it has often been overlooked that the “quoting” of sounds and styles acts to historicize contemporary culture’. Rap is perhaps the best example of sampling being used in this way. When asked to name the black means of cultural expression, the African American cultural theorist Cornel West, answered, ‘music and preaching’. He went on to say,
rap is unique because it combines the black preacher and the black music tradition, replacing the liturgical ecclesiastical setting with the African polyrhythms of the street. A tremendous articulateness is syncopated with the African drumbeat, the African funk, into an American postmodernist product: there is no subject expressing originary anguish here but a fragmented subject, pulling from past and present, innovatively producing a heterogeneous product. The stylistic combination of the oral, the literate, and the musical is exemplary . . . it is part and parcel of the subversive energies of black underclass youth, energies that are forced to take a cultural mode of articulation because of the political lethargy of American society.
This is a rejection of Jameson’s claim that such work can be dismissed as an example of postmodern pastiche. The intertextual play of quotations in rap is not the result of aesthetic exhaustion; these are not the fragments of modernism shored against aesthetic ruin and cultural decline, but fragments combined to make a voice to be heard loudly within a hostile culture: the twisting of dismissal and denial into defiance.
Watch: Modernism and Postmodernism – An Analysis of Blow-Up
Estimated time to complete: 10 minutes
No transcript is currently available
Watch: OK Soda - Advertising and Postmodernism
Estimated time to complete: 9 minutes
No transcript is currently available
Topic 4: Metanarratives
This topic addresses the following objectives: Analyze an artifact of popular culture from multiple perspectives.
Estimated time to complete topic: 30 minutes Evaluate: Metanarratives
Watch: Postmodernism & the Metanarrative
No transcript is currently available
Estimated time to complete: 4 minutes
Evaluate: Metanarratives – Social Justice Art Education
While art tends to be thought of as something that belongs in a museum or hanging on a wall in a house, there are actually many different kinds of artistic expression. This unit looks at a specific kind of art that takes place in public spaces, specifically social justice art. Social justice art fits into a family of like-minded artistic expressions, like community-based art, public art, and art for social change. These community-based and collaborative forms of art aim at challenging the status quo in society and working toward justice for all.
As you read the resource for this unit, consider how art reflects individuals’ own identities, experiences, and interests, especially when working in a collaborative setting. You might want to reflect on where you’ve seen community-based art projects, especially since they’ve grown in popularity recently: Are there murals, community gardens, or even graffiti projects that you’ve seen firsthand that would fall under the heading of social justice art? What do you make of these projects?
Watch: Art as Activism
No transcript is currently available
Estimated time to complete: 14 minutes
Evaluate: Metanarratives – TED Talks and Traditional Popular Culture
You have probably watched at least one TED Talk in your life, and you have likely watched at least one in your education at Herzing, either in required or supplemental materials for your courses. TED stands for technology, entertainment, and design, and the initial idea was to have original thinkers and industry leaders give speeches that “pack a punch” in 18 minutes or less. TED Talks have grown enormously in popularity.
Watch: Pop culture is dead! – TEDx Working
Estimated time to complete: 13 minutes
Topic 6: Social Injustice and Pop Culture Movements
This topic addresses the following objectives: Analyze an artifact of popular culture from multiple perspectives.
Estimated time to complete topic: 2 hours Evaluate: Social Justice and Pop Culture Movements
Watch: Pop Culture: What's Wrong with the Media
No transcript is currently available
Estimated time to complete: 5 minutes
Topic 7: Blending Pop Culture
This topic addresses the following objectives: Analyze an artifact of popular culture from multiple perspectives.
Estimated time to complete topic: 2 hours
Review: Blending Pop Culture.
Many voices can work toward forming one narrative, be it in terms of the relationship between spiritual and sacred music, or toward exposing social injustices and ills. Pop culture can help blend in cultures from every where.
Watch: Pop Culture in the Arab World
No transcript is currently available
Estimated time to complete: 8 minutes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2qLiMbpi10
